Wisconsin native, conservative critic of everything.
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." ---G K Chesterton
"The only objective of Liberty is Life" --G K Chesterton
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions" --G K Chesterton
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

Monday, November 14, 2011

Did "Harassment" Jump the Shark?

If Herman Cain does nothing else for the country, at least he showed that "sex harassment" has jumped the shark.

...Codes of sexual harassment imagine an entirely symmetrical universe, where people are never outrageous, rude, awkward, excessive or confused, where sexual interest is always absent or reciprocated, in other words a universe that does not entirely resemble our own. We don’t legislate against meanness, or power struggles, or political maneuvering, or manipulation in offices, and how could we? So should we be legislating against rogue flirtations, the floating out of invitations? Obviously there is a line, which if the allegations against Mr. Cain are true, he has crossed, but there are many behaviors loosely included under the creative, capacious rubric of sexual harassment that do not cross that line.

The problem is, as it always was, the capaciousness of the concept, the umbrella-like nature of the charge: sexual harassment includes both demanding sex in exchange for a job or a comment about someone’s dress. The words used in workshops — “uncomfortable,” “inappropriate,” “hostile” — are vague, subjective, slippery. Feminists and liberal pundits say, with some indignation, that they are not talking about dirty jokes or misguided compliments when they talk about sexual harassment, but, in fact, they are: sexual harassment, as they’ve defined it, encompasses a wide and colorful spectrum of behaviors.

So a Federal employee may make an allegation of "harassment" which will *POOF* go away if she's granted a $16K/year raise, a year off (and a scholarship) to attend grad school, yadayada.

Just "uncomfortable," ya' know. It was "inappropriate." They were "hostile."

Meantime--just as with racism--the REAL victims will be marginalized by the Broadway-Show Babes and their rapacious, omnipresent, attorneys.